Core Domains of Team Principles
Team principles are organized into three interconnected domains. Together they form a comprehensive framework for assessing and developing team effectiveness across behavioral, structural, and contextual dimensions.
Domain 1 — Teamwork Behaviors
How team members interact, communicate, back each other up, and develop shared interdependence. Teamwork behaviors are the interpersonal processes that bind individual effort into coordinated collective action — distinct from the technical work (taskwork) each member performs individually (Guzzo & Salas, 1995; Parker, 1994).
Domain 2 — Leadership and Composition
How team leaders guide, model, and develop team performance, and how teams are composed with the right mix of knowledge, skills, and diversity. Effective leadership and intentional composition are structural enablers of team performance — a team with the wrong mix of people or an ineffective leader cannot be rescued by process alone (Bell et al., 2018; Guzzo & Salas, 1995; Mathieu et al., 2019).
Domain 3 — Enabling Conditions
Hackman’s (2011) six structural and contextual conditions that should be in place for a team to have a better-than-average chance of success. These conditions operate at the level of team design and organizational context, not individual behavior — they are the foundation on which teamwork behaviors and leadership can take hold.
References
Bell, S. T., Brown, S. G., Colaneri, A., & Outland, N. (2018). Team composition and the ABCs of teamwork. American Psychologist, 73(4), 349–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000305
Guzzo, R. A., & Salas, E. (1995). Team effectiveness and decision making in organizations. Jossey-Bass.
Hackman, R. J. (2011). Collaborative intelligence: Using teams to solve hard problems. Berrett-Koehler.
Mathieu, J. E., Gallagher, P. T., Domingo, M. A., & Klock, E. A. (2019). Embracing complexity: Reviewing the past decade of team effectiveness research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 6(1), 17–46. https://doi.org/10.1143/annurev-orgpsych-012218-015106
Parker, G. M. (1994). Cross-functional teams: Working with allies, enemies & other strangers. Jossey-Bass.